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No matter your beliefs, am I the only one who finds it odd (but highly predictable) that they are ALWAYS about God, redemption, the after-life and the end-of-the-world and NEVER about atheism? What does this troubling observation tell us about being directed by the Holy Spirit and/or inner knowing and faith?

hmm, that is sinister isn't it? like maybe our minds can be likened to a landscape or 3D physical place, and right near the area devoted to God and stuff like that, there's a big, leering, ominous, sinister Pandora's box. a weird twisted faith becomes a suicidal urge with no actual foundation.

How bout it, no ones got a tag on suicide. All sorts of believers do it, even an atheist friend of mine did a few months ago.

How many people have been on the planet in the last 100 years? Over 8 billion? How many committed suicide in a cult? Less then 1000?

To end up in such a cult, one already has some serious mental and emotional issues.

All things considered, more people are killing themselves and others every year in drunk driving accidents. People are killing themselves with alcohol alone, not to mention, food via obesity, stress and carelessness.

Why not discuss what makes people stop caring about themselves and others leading to early and unnatural deaths? They far out number the ones who care so little they find their way into a screwy cult.

Hey, what could be more spiritual than DEATH! It's not like a near-death experiance, it's like a DEATH experiance!

I assume that cults are defined by their manipulation and recruiting (and often exploitation, but not necessarily) of desperate, depressed, and insecure people. These people already have a statistical predisposition to suicide.

I suppose mass suicide could be some twisted yet legitamate spiritual practice. Their just are many long lasting suicide cults because... well, you know. You just have to wonder, though, how many people are coerced into it!

If you are suggesting that these peoples knowledge of divine truth drove them to suicidal mania... who knows! There are plenty of "End Time" sects who don't commit suicide, so I doubt that has too much to do with it.

Why aren't their athiest suicide cults? Because their athiests! They can't have cults by definition! I suppose the U.S.S.R. could be an athiest cult, along with the Capitalist Money Cult. Any dictatorship is very cult-like (like the Nazis) but many still have religious beliefs (like pre-war Iraq and Saddams' regime).

It's a very complex subject and very interesting too!

Here's a good question: Is a cult bad if it is a cult of love? Like one of those creepy "I love you" cults?

> he said cults like mass suicides not one or two people at different times!!!!

I have read about several mass suicides taht are not religion related. The last one I can remember was a group of five or six high school students. I think there is a difference between the non-faith-based mass suicides and mass cult suicides... with a cult, often it is the leader that is a nut and brainwashes (or forces) everybody else to his will. When the leader decides it is time to go, he takes his flock of sheep with him. In non-cult based mass suicides, the people all have a common pain that they are trying to escape.

How bout it, no ones got a tag on suicide. All sorts of believers do it, even an atheist friend of mine did a few months ago.This has nothing to do with a suicide cult and Armageddon, and more to do with depression

To end up in such a cult, one already has some serious mental and emotional issues. Source? Do all people that go to a church where end times are prophecied have similar problems?

Why not discuss what makes people stop caring about themselves and others leading to early and unnatural deaths? Gee, I dunno. Why don't I address every issue there is in one thread? How silly of me not to mention pollution and deforestation and gluttony in this topic.

Quote:Swami said:Why not discuss what makes people stop caring about themselves and others leading to early and unnatural deaths? Gee, I dunno. Why don't I address every issue there is in one thread? How silly of me not to mention pollution and deforestation and gluttony in this topic.

LMAO! Well give it time and eventually this thread will turn into some monster made of topics you never thought could make it in. So maybe we can fit those in too!

What I find puzzling is that Swami is using the word ?always? in this tread. Atheists are all about how ?rational? they are in how they formulate their thoughts (which is why they are atheist in the first place). How 'bout those little varmints that all run and jump off a very steep cliff (all at once)? Now that I think about it, I do remember one over the edge first had a rosary in it's little paw, in the picture in my old 7th grade science book. Wow, I never thought about it before. Suppressed memory, I suppose. Wonder what gonzo would say? Let me pretend, at the sake of being criticized, at this troubling moment. (Writer prepares himself by picturing Johnny Depp doing gonzo in the movie, F&L...)"For fuck sake man! Pull yourself together! As your client, I order you to start making sense of all this! I didn?t do this for anyone?s sake but my own. Better dead than old, if you ask me." Wait till they see the bats, the poor bastards....Egotism has it's strengths but it also has a dark side. Cults, such as the ones exemplified here, don't always involve suicide but we have come to accept these acts as part and parcel of the name because of how incredible it seems to anyone outside the mindset, of such a group. Egotism develops in an environment absent of faith since, by definition, faith acknowledges the absence of fact. Egotism can only end in physical death which is why we are here (at the shroomery literally and figuratively), expanding upon what has come before us so that we don?t end with physical death. The problem, in the matrix of human thinking, is that we cannot perceive life without death, thus religion/dogma in the first place. In reality, we cannot ?live? until we are no longer in fear of death. Atheism is perceived as an enemy of these ideas but in reality we cannot ?believe? without imagining that there is no god or higher order (like John Lennon said, ?Imagine?) of which we can appeal the injustices of our own world/existence. Instead, we teach ourselves to be deluded by our own thoughts (egotism) and ability to prove fact from fiction. While digesting only a tiny portion of the universe around us, our human brains construct the remaining world we live inside, only to be shocked when it crumbles around us. Cults form when people crumble emotionally and then look to someone for answers to such existential questions as, ?what happens when we die??. One ego trades for another and the balance of responsibility is shifted to a central ?higher power? of one sort or another. In a cult it is a specific person that ultimately cannot provide these answers and in some cases they commit suicide in mass because the followers cannot face yet another emotional collapse of facing the personal failure of placing their "faith" in the hands of anyone other than themselves.

These two have nothing to do with inner-knowing becuase if you 'know', you dont require belief or faith you are just 'Knowing' in a nonconceptual way, how you are. Religion requires observation of ones condition in relation to that religion not brainwashing via faith and belief into some altered way of thinking.

Some teachers say that athiests make the best practitioners of truth becuase they do not blind themselves with belief and faith, and can observe and analyise a teaching better to see if their is anything of benefit that can be applied.

Faith can be the evil shepard's tool to blind the weak, belief can be the path leading to the slaughter house.

the blind leading the blind comes to thought, Strangely enough, Jesus taught against following blindly, the church/christianity in general have become the same pharisees that Jesus was so against...

anyways, swami, if someone tell you to kill yourself for salvation, that's not listening to your inner feeling/holy spirit, but listening to an outward influence, right?

--------------------hello, your name is life on earth
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"I traveled a long way seeking God, but when I finally gave up and turned back, there He was, within me! O Lalli! Now why do you wander like a beggar? Make some effort, and He will grant you a vision of Himself in the form of bliss in your heart." -the saint of the Kashmir Shaivism tradition: Lalli.

the reason they are called cults is because of the belief system. a group of atheists commiting suicide without dogma would be a "group suicide". the Valentines Suicideparty2005 is not a cult, if they had "succeded", i think the media would call it a "group suicide" or perhaps simply a "suicide party".